20000915

I need a good negative sounding word for "not" and "no." I'm tempted to follow most of the rest of western civilization and make it something with "n-," but this is going to require some thought. Then again, of course, the greek "δέν and δέ-" play a large role as well in many latin-based english words (defragment, detract, decentralization, &c.). The word "nag" sprang to mind immediately for some strange reason, but since nag is already the auxiliary indicator of the future tense, and since it means snake in hindi, and since it isn't far from "gam" backwards, i will have to think further. Something negative-sounding but not necessarily related to anything in particular. "blec"? No, that doesn't sound right. Because then "isn't" would be "blec ec" or "ec blec" (i haven't decided on word order yet). How about "bleg"? Yes, i do think i like that better.

yes

gam

no, not

bleg

maybe

vi§ivi§i

I don't know where vi§ivi§i came from; it just popped into my mind, and i liked it. "And on the first day he said ‘Let there be vi§ivi§i!' And lo! he saw that it was good." No, i'm not on crack. Shut up.

Something just occurred to me about those durned suffixes again. Technically, the accusative form of "that" should be "ulað," but if i did that, there would be no distinction between ulo and uli in the accusative, or indeed with any suffixes added to them.

Official decision for the moment: The french get by very nicely without that distinction, so should this language. Ulo and uli will remain separate when they stand alone, but when they take an accusative form, they will be "ulað." When they modify a noun, however, they will behave in the same way as the definite article, hence they will follow the suffix.

New idea here. I'm having a hard time coming up with suitable words for certain things, so i'm going to try a little experiment. It's time to create the runes, and when they're done, i'll do this the old-fashioned nordic way: I'll throw the runes in a bag and pull them out, and create a word from the letters i've drawn. Better still, i'll just draw out consonants, and fill in the vowels as i see fit. Heck, maybe i'll do that anyway and pull out some vowels too. It could keep things interesting.

Okay, i have 36 runes, which seems to be a nice number. A, AA, B, C, CS, C§, D, DJ, DZ, Ð, E, F, G, GJ, GZ, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, §, T, TS, T§, Þ, U, V, W, Y, Y, Z. Or, rather, those are the letters that will eventually become runes. That will be a project for another day, or at least another hour. Now for the drawing...

By the way, i've decided that "aa" will be pronounced as the IPA symbol ɔ. Much like the o in dog, or the aw in awful. The word jaag rhymes exactly with standard american pronunciation of the word dog.

I need a new name for this language, because calling it "New Language Project" is getting really obnoxious. That will be the first word to come out of the hat.

And here it is folks... Aw, jeez, that's not impressive-sounding. Fodzat§egj. How about backwards, then? Gjet§adzof. That's not even fun to say. Get rid of the fodza. Malt§egj. Hmmm, now that sounds better. By official decree of the High and Most Holy Ruler of the Kingdom of Malt§egjaran, this language is called Malt§egj.

Maybe i should add a few duplicate runes of ones that i particularly like, or ones that sound good in this language. I have a particular predeliction for Ð, GJ, R, L, M, J, and Þ. Perhaps i should have runes for all plosive-fricative combinations. Adding the labials and the dentals would then give us the following rune combinations: BV, BÐ, BZ, BJ, DV, DÐ, DZ, DJ, GV, GÐ, GZ, and GJ; and their unvoiced counterparts: PF, PÞ, PS, P§, TF, TÞ, TS, T§, CF, CÞ, CS, and C§. Not sure if adding 24 separate runes to an alphabet just to save space is really a good idea, but since i have not yet created the runes, i'll just wait a bit and work that out later.